February 07, 2018

After nearly ten years, my second novel, MEMENTO PARK, is about to come out, with blurbs from Salman Rushdie, Marisa Silver, Min Jin Lee and Joseph O'Neill, as well as starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. Please come by one of my appearances or pre-order the book from any of the usual places if you can't make it in person!

October 16, 2014

At its height, The Elegant Variation had over 50,000 daily readers. It gave me the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of books I loved, like Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit, and it engendered many stimulating, international conversations between thoughtful, well-read readers and writers. After my daughter was born and my first book came out, I had to make some decisions about allocating my time, and TEV went fallow, though I've kept the page and its archives available. But I've missed the immersion in literary topics and the connections and discussions that the blog made possible.

The conversation seems to have moved on from blogs to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and the rest. Blogs now feel very Web 1.0 But I've been attracted to and inspired by the intimacy and samizdat feel of the newsletter form, and thought I'd try a little experiment. I'm leaving the form open to revision (and feedback - please), but I envision an email digest (perhaps weekly, perhaps bi-weekly) for my friends, former students and perhaps interested strangers, of literary matters that interest or excite me. I've long said that successful blogs were, first and foremost, a record of their proprietor's enthusiasms and were driven by voice; and in TEV 2.0 (the newsletter edition), I'll continue to share my enthusiasms - what to read, books to buy, readings to attend - in my now-familiar (though slightly tempered with age and exhaustion) voice. Maybe it will catch on, maybe it won't. But to paraphrase Charles Foster Kane, I think it would be fun to run a newsletter.

If you'd like to go ahead and sign up, the link is here. The first issue is already on deck and waiting to go out, and includes Joseph O'Neill's THE DOG, Calvino, LA readings and "Life getting in the way" of writing time.

May 28, 2014

I cannot think of a more beneficial fellowship for a writer to apply for than the PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship. It's a yearlong intensive for new writers who lack access that includes close mentoring, exposure to literary events, classes at the UCLA Writers Program and much, much more. I have had students who have been Fellows, students who have gone on to become Fellows; I know the people who run the program and I cannot sing its praises highly enough.

March 03, 2014

In all the years I have been reading Banville, he's only made one Los Angeles area appearance. This week he makes his second, as part of the excellent Writers Bloc series. He's in town - appropriately enough - to discuss his (or, rather, Benjamin Black's) new take on Marlowe:

In Black’s new book, The Black-Eyed Blonde, Philip Marlowe resurfaces so clearly, so visibly, that you can feel his alienation at the wealthy heiress’ mansion on the beach. You are dropped straight into old LA’s Barney’s Beanery, where Marlowe fishes for information about the blonde’s missing boyfriend. The story: a guy goes missing. The wealthy blonde girlfriend wants to find him. But of course that’s only the very first part of the tale. It’s in the complications, the nature of the character and the conflict that we realize that Benjamin Black’s great Dublin character, Quirke, is not unlike Raymond Chandler’s rumpled Los Angeles Marlowe. In Black’s most capable hands, our Marlowe lives and breathes as if Raymond Chandler himself willed him to life. Being a Dubliner, Black alludes to Dublin and to Ireland, lending authenticity to his re-creation. Philip Marlowe has finally met his dopelganger.

Please don't get me wrong. I think that many, if not all, of these topics are of genuine importance. But I have already read your essay. I read it last year. I read it the year before. I've been reading it for the last decade. And it wasn't interesting or original then, either. So, editors, if you're thinking of assigning any of these chestnuts, seriously rethink it. And writers, if you really feel the need to wade in yet again, you sure as shit better bring something new to the discussion. Because the Internet is starting to feel like Groundhog Day on steroids.

January 15, 2014

"When we visit his parents, my daughter tries to learn to swin at the indoor pool. I watch her serious, scrunched-up face, eyes closed, counting one stroke, two strokes. A few days later, she is up to fifty. Then my husband arrives from Brooklyn and she insists we rush him straight from the airport to the pool. But when we get there, she won't do it. I am tight-lipped, resentful of all the fuss she has required to be made, the great anticlimax of it. My husband falls asleep in a deck chair as we are deliberating. He has been up all night, spraying poison. His mother, bright-eyed, gentles her through the water. 'Once a swimmer, always a swimmer,' she says.

(Yes, it's been a while, people. Been busy writing novels and shit. And I've promised myself in 2014 to try to use social media to share my enthusiams, and not to carp and complain. This is the first novel in quite a while that I've felt compelled to bring to your attention. Consider yourselves on notice.)

For those who don't know about the Writers Studio, it's an amazing four-day intensive held every February. And my revision class is really the only class of its kind that I am aware of anywhere, one that takes a close, hands-on look at how to attack revising a novel. (There are lots of first novel classes out there but they only get you to the first draft.) It's a great combination of lecture and craft work, using the transformation of Trimalchio into The Great Gatsby as its focus. Last year's students loved the course, and I'm looking forward to teaching it again in a few weeks.

July 11, 2013

The only thing that could keep me away from Andrew Sean Greer's Pasadena reading this evening is teaching, and unfortunately I have a class tonight. But otherwise I would make the trek for Greer's only L.A. appearance to hear him read from his latest novel, "The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells."

I am a longtime fan of Greer's fiction - he was my first author interview here at TEV all those years ago - and I'm eager to crack open the covers on this one. (We've also appeared together at LAPL ALOUD, and he was kind enough to blurb my first novel.)

He's an engaging reader, and is very much worth making the trip for. I hope you'll head out to Pasadena this evening, and support a tremendous novelist and a fine independent bookstore. What could be better, right?

“No one tells the secrets of the human heart more bravely or eloquently than Andrew Sean Greer. He has been called our Proust, our Nabokov, but with this novel he transcends all comparison. This is a genius-stroke of a book. Read it and weep.”

June 28, 2013

Along the way, I thought I might grab some select titles and tweet the opening sentence or 140 characters of the opening sentence, whichever comes first. Nothing more. No titles, authors. Just sentences. A sort of cubist collage of my library.

You can follow the progress on my Twitter feed for as long as your (and my) interest is sustained.

May 19, 2013

I am forever urging my students to mark up their books, to scribble, deface and decode. It's only by interacting with the books we admire at the sentence level that writers can begin to unlock the secrets of how one's heroes have accomplished their magic. (I should add this need came painfully to me, as I do have the collector's gene, courtesy of my father, and am always aware of the value of objects. But in the end, I forced myself to pick up a pen, and I've never looked back.)

The annotations are called out on the website, and I found this one most interesting and amusing:

p.88 [on 'succubus'] 'Really should get hold of a dictionary. I'll be interested to see if he/she got to the end of the book before selling it to the second-hand shop. Could have exchanged it for a Chambers or a Shorter Oxford.'

The notion of Banville with a dictionary should resonate for anyone who has read him. I was also struck by this one:

p.244 'Never noticed before the pre-echo of p.264. K[afka] is right, one works in deepest darkness.'

It always fascinates me when writers detect their influences after the fact. In contrast, I suppose I should confess that my second novel is heavily indebted to Banville's own The Book of Evidence - nothing after the fact there. I recently worked my way through the book, taking it apart, trying to figure out how he could break so many rules and still have the book succeed marvelously. Here's a sample of my own, far messier, marginalia:

I cannot figure out why this keeps posting on its side, but you get the general idea. I will leave it to future readers to determine how well I've internalized the lessons of this novel but I remain devoted to my idea that if you are a writer and there is a book you adore, there is no better exercise than stripping the thing down to its foundations to see what it's made of.

February 21, 2013

"You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive" is the observation that launched a thousand films, sequels, and imitators. The first words (after "How are you?") that Holmes says upon meeting Watson in A Study in Scarlet have become the template for all that follows: A display of extraordinary, apparently superhuman deduction, seemingly arbitrary but, upon closer inspection, the result of the methodical assemblage of a handful of details. Other men see; Holmes observes. And who among his fans has not, even briefly, imagined that we, too, might observe as Holmes does?

Maria Konnikova takes this impulse and gives us hope in her first book, Mastermind: How to Think like Sherlock Holmes, although the book might be more accurately titled How Sherlock Holmes Thinks like Sherlock Holmes. Readers looking for a prescriptive program to turn them into Holmesian cogitation machines may come away disappointed. But those seeking to understand the neurological and psychological underpinnings of the great detective's mind will find a knowledgeable guide in Konnikova.

The Telegraph looks at five young authors to watch in 2013. TEV favorite Sheila Heti is on the list, but I'm especially intrigued by Owen Martell's novel Intermission:

A slim, rigourously nuanced book, Intermission tells the story of how [Bill] Evans’s family try to support him in 1961 when he is devastated by the accidental death of Scott LaFaro, bass player in his celebrated trio. His protective elder brother Harry knows he is a drug addict and fears the worst.

Jazz novels are always so hard to pull off (Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter succeeds; Morrison's Jazz does not), but I've always been so intrigued by the Evans/LaFaro relationship. LaFaro was a prodigy, killed obscenely young, whose influence is still felt among jazz bassists. It sounds like a fascinating read.

In a long and uncharacterstically personal essay in the Daily Mail, John Banville reflects on old age - his own and his parents':

Thinking back on the lives of one's parents and making comparisons with one's own life can be a dizzying exercise. It startles me to realise that when my father was the age I am now, past my mid-60s, he was long retired and preparing with more or less ­equanimity for his dotage.

The essay includes a remarkable photo of an eight-year-old Banville. You can read it all here.

October 27, 2012

Daniel Mendelsohn, one of my favorite critics working today, will be at LAPL next month as part of the ALOUD series, in conversation with Jonathan Lethem. Not to be missed. Reserve a spot for the November 8 event, which is free,
here.

Like many others, I lamented the passing of the mighty Jacques Barzun, one of the last in a line of scholars still interested in addressing a general public, as he did most memorably in his justly celebrated From Dawn to Decadence. Here's a brief passage that's characteristic of Barzun's style:

The Modern Era begins, characteristically, with a revolution. It is commonly called the Protestant Reformation, but the train of events starting early in the 16C and ending-if indeed it has ended-more than a century later has all the features of a revolution. I take these to be: the violent transfer of power and property in the name of an idea.

We have got into the habit of calling too many things revolutions. Given a new device or practice that changes our homely habits, we exclaim: "revolutionary!" But revolutions change more than personal habits or a widespread practice. They give culture a new face. Between the great upheaval of the 1500s and the present, only three later ones are of the same order. True, the history books give the name to a dozen or more such violent events, but in these uprisings it was only the violence that was great. They were but local aftershocks of one or other of the four main quakes: the 16C religious revolution; the 17C monarchical revolution; the liberal, individualist "French" revolution that straddles the 18th and 19th; and the 20C "Russian," social and collectivist.

The quotation marks around French and Russian are meant to show that those names are only conventional. The whole western world was brooding over the Idea of each before it exploded into war, and the usual dates 1789 and 1917 mark only the trigger incidents. It took decades for the four to work out their first intention and side effects-and their ruling ideas have not ceased to act.

July 10, 2012

I'm a proud alum of LDM and will be among those checking out tomorrow's installment at the Hammer Museum. Participants include Henry Rollins and Rex Pickett, and it's free, which is my favorite number.

May 29, 2012

A classic example of counter-programming: My review of Eric Erlandson's Letters to Kurt is now live at the excellent Los Angeles Review of Books.

I include this anecdote not to parade my musical taste (or lack of it) before you, but to illustrate how possible it was, in that pre-Internet era, to willfully opt out of the zeitgeist. (It's still possible, but the shame is harder to escape, and generally requires secluded cabins in remote woods.) As grunge was roaring out of Seattle to hypnotize and unsettle a nation, my 30-year-old self was including Blue Swede on mixtapes. The only meaningful impact the movement had on my life was the sudden robust availability of high quality messenger bags. I missed all of it. Nirvana. Pearl Jam. Kurt and Courtney.

Of course, the era didn't pass me by entirely: the headlines were inescapable, especially Cobain's Hemingwayesque coda, and Love's ongoing, embarrassing theatrics. But I must admit that, prior to picking up Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson's Letters to Kurt, I had never listened to a Hole, or even a Nirvana, album all the way through. Yet I was intrigued by the book's format: a sincere preface followed by 52 almost impressionistic sketches that displayed, at first glance, a certain lightness of touch, a (perhaps unsurprising) musicality in the prose. Erlandson, present at the creation as Love's co-founder of Hole, seemed a promising guide to all I'd missed, even if he was guilty of occasionally overstating his place in the grand scheme. (He can sometimes read a bit like the actor in Shakespeare in Love who summarizes Romeo & Juliet as being "about a nurse.") Something about Erlandson's disarmingly earnest tone initially engaged me more than I expected: "All those fallen female archetypes. Little girls wearing mother's heels and apron." I began to consider the possibility that this book might have value as something other than a post-grunge artifact, yet another piece of the true cross for Cobain obsessives to fetishize. Perhaps, coming to the work unburdened by the albatross of Cobain's martyrdom, I was uniquely well placed to consider its purely literary value. A small reward for missing a cultural moment, it turns out, and harder to accomplish than I imagined.

May 16, 2012

There’s something else in my past that I only recently realized contributed to my perseverance in writing poems, and that is my love of chess. I was taught the game in wartime Belgrade by a retired professor of astronomy when I was six years old and over the next few years became good enough to beat not just all the kids my age, but many of the grownups in the neighborhood. My first sleepless nights, I recall, were due to the games I lost and replayed in my head. Chess made me obsessive and tenacious. Already then, I could not forget each wrong move, each humiliating defeat. I adored games in which both sides are reduced to a few figures each and in which every single move is of momentous significance. Even today, when my opponent is a computer program (I call it “God”) that outwits me nine out of ten times, I’m not only in awe of its superior intelligence, but find my losses far more interesting to me than my infrequent wins. The kinds of poems I write—mostly short and requiring endless tinkering—often recall for me games of chess. They depend for their success on word and image being placed in proper order and their endings must have the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate.

I will be appearing on a blogging panel at the 2012 conference of the Biographers International Organization. I'm still not completely certain why biographers would like to hear from me, but they asked, I was free, and so here we go. Isn't blogging pretty 1.0 by this point?

The Worthy Readings sidebar has been updated through July with a slew of new readings ranging from Richard Ford to Dana Spiotta to Charles Yu to ... Steve Almond. You read that right. Click through and check out all the updates.

Ben Fountain is in town this evening to read from his long awaited novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. You can find all the details about the reading here. Adam Langer's glowing review can be found here.

The book's not merely good; it's Pulitzer Prize-quality good, so much so that readers might find themselves wishing it had been published last year so that the Pulitzer committee could have saved themselves the bother of a hung jury, and just given its damn award to Fountain.

March 03, 2012

In his review of John Leonard's greatest hits collection, Troy Patterson - without a shred of irony or apparent self-knowledge - approvingly quotes the master:

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”

Patterson, it should be remembered, turned in a review of my novel that so was vicious that Gawker - Gawker - was prompted to ask "what's up with that." How preposterous do you have to be for Gawker to call you "mean-spirited"?

I'd have higher hopes for the new Slate project if it wasn't deploying television critics to review real books ...

February 28, 2012

Apropos l'affaire D'Agata, I came across this amusing and illuminating bit in John McPhee's paean to fact checkers, Checkpoints, collected in the superb Silk Parachutes (FSG 2010):

In "The Third Man," in the immortal Ferris-wheel scene high above postwar Vienna, Orson Welles as Henry Lime implies that he has been selling diluted penicillin to Viennese hospitals but asks his lifelong friend Joseph Cotten if one of those little moving dots down there (one of those human beings) could really matter in the long scheme of things. On the ground, he adds:

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

I learned, or Richard learned - we've forgotten who learned - that Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay of "The Third Man," only later published ther preliminary treatment as a novella, and the cuckoo-clock speech does not appear either in the novella or in the original screenplay. Greene did not write it. Orson Welles thought it up and said it.

I'm essentially unsympathetic to D'Agata's argument, as I've been to those who came before and forced the rubric "Creative Nonfiction" upon us, which continues to encourage writers to take all sorts of questionable liberties with the facts. If you want to make it up, as I've always said, write a novel. On the other hand don't - I don't need the competition.

February 20, 2012

I brought a dozen books to class, pretty randomly selected from the titles that arrive every month. I did limit the selection to novels, and tried to weed out any obviously awful candidates, but for the most part these were books I knew little or nothing about. I recognized some authors, had dipped a few pages into some of them, but I did try to be as random as possible.

Sneakers Verdant Green amp; X Ricky CR Basket Puma White Dee I put the books out on my desk and I invited my students to come up and quickly grab a book. I told them not to try to match their taste, not to look for authors they knew - in fact, to avoid looking at the book altogether if possible. Just grab one.

They took them back to their desks and I asked them all to read the title they'd drawn for our next class. The request was not greeted with universal enthusiasm, until I began to explain the idea behind the experiment.

I told them that we all - myself included - can easily become victims of our readerly prejudices. (I wonder how many great books I've missed, insisting that I don't care for historical fiction. Wolf Hall?) I also said in the age of Amazon, which thinks it's a good idea to pair every book you buy with other books just like it, we increasingly risk falling into a narrow little echo chamber. It's great that everyone is reading Ricky Sneakers Puma CR Dee X Green Basket Verdant amp; White A Visit from the Goon Squad, but how many lesser known titles get lost every year in that rush toward the One Big Thing.

I reminded them that Paula Fox enjoyed a remarkable renaissance simply because Jonathan Franzen had randomly plucked her book from the shelves at Yaddo. And I told them that every serious writer I knew was open and experimental and willing to take a chance on any number of books - not just the things we know we like.

Surprise, surprise. More than one student came back admitting they'd loved a book they'd otherwise never read. And one student didn't like a book she fully expected to love, but she had immersed herself in solving the problem of why the book did not work for her, and closed in on what she took to be the inauthenticity of the voice. In order words, she was thinking like a writer.

After years of resisting the tide, I officially started using my long-dormant Twitter account today. I have some mixed feelings about this event. On the one hand, my attention span feels fractured enough already, and I'm reluctant to deform it any further. I'm also worried about my well-documented obsessive tendencies - I've never met a rabbit hole I couldn't happily fall down. But I've had the increasing sense that there was a potentially scintillating conversation taking place elsewhere, so I've heeded the advice of my dear friend Lauren Cerand and waded in.

Flash in the pan? Life-changing moment? Remains to be seen. Follow my account and see for yourself.

February 17, 2012

Not sure how this one escaped my notice - when in doubt, I now blame everything on the kid - but there's a must-see reading this Sunday. Edward St. Aubyn, whose Patrick Melrose novels have been rapturously received from likes of Zadie Smith and Francine Prose, will be at Skylight Books at 5 p.m. Here's what Prose had to say last Sunday:

St. Aubyn’s books are at once extremely dark and extremely funny. In “Bad News,” Patrick visits New York, where his father has just died. “It was late May, it was hot, and he really ought to take off his overcoat, but his overcoat was his defense against the thin shards of glass that passers-­by slipped casually under his skin, not to mention the slow-motion explosion of shop windows, the bone-rattling thunder of subway trains and the heartbreaking passage of each second, like a grain of sand trickling through the hourglass of his body. No, he would not take off his overcoat. Do you ask a lobster to disrobe?” In “At Last,” a minor character is described as having three drawbacks as a guest: “She was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions.” Meanwhile, the humor is deepened by our sense that the dazzling pyrotechnics of Patrick’s banter have become a source of pain. In his own witticisms, he now hears echoes of the “pure contempt” of his father’s mocking humor.

I'm actually considered stamping my passport and making the trek from the Palisades. Details here. Even I can't get there, you should most definitely go.

February 06, 2012

Time after time I've taken to these pages to decry the idiocy of Elmore Leonard's inexplicably lauded 10 Rules of Writing, to absolutely no avail. No decent interval can pass before someone out there notes them approvingly, and I'm forced back to the keyboard to object.

The latest offender is Olen Steinhauer, who says the following in his recent review of Leonard's latest novel, Raylan:

In an essay that appeared in The New York Times in 2001, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,” Elmore Leonard listed his 10 rules of writing. The final one — No. 11, actually — the “most important rule . . . that sums up the 10,” is “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” It’s a terrific rule. In fact, I liked it so much that I passed it on to a creative-writing class I once taught.

It's actually a silly, empty rule. If I were to put that rule in front of my students, here's what I'd tell them: That it's one of those bits of seemingly clever writing that, upon actual closer examination, says nothing at all. First of all, what - exactly - is "writing that sounds like writing"? Does Shakespeare sound like writing? Does Ondaatje? Does Zadie Smith? Does Faulkner? Does Pynchon? It is a useless measure.

What one presumes Leonard is saying, given the other dumbed-down rules on his list, is that he eschews what we commonly refer to, for want of a better term, as lyrical prose. One imagines he would have John Banville, Joseph O'Neill and Teju Cole busily erasing their manuscripts. On the other hand, if he doesn't mean that, perhaps he means writing that, because it fails - because it is, essentially bad writing - feels "written". So, basically, fix bad writing. Thanks a whole heap, Elmo.

The point, of course, is that these kind of lists, while sometimes amusing, rarely have anything to do with the real work of writing. (I prefer to paraphrase Deborah Eisenberg to my students - you can do anything you want, provided you can do it.) And it's dispiriting to see people who should know better trot these rules out yet again as some touchstone of great writing. They aren't. As the TLS so wisely pointed out about this list when it first appeared:

The eleventh rule is: If you come across lists such as this, ignore them. The rules may sound sensible enough, but, with the exception of No 5, each could be replaced with its opposite, and still be reasonable advice. Leonard complains that, while reading a book by Mary McCarthy, he had to "stop and get the dictionary" - as if it were a form of pain (William Faulkner, who broke most of these rules whenever he wrote, complained of Hemingway that he "never used a word you had to look up in the dictionary"). And what is meant by "leave out the part that readers tend to skip"? If every writer tried to be as exciting as Leonard, there would be no Brothers Karamazov, no Anna Karenina (remember those exquisitely boring sections on agronomy?), and the shelf reserved for Dickens or Balzac would measure about a foot. Banish patois, and we lose a library of fiction stretching from Huckleberry Finn to Trainspotting. As for dialogue, if Leonard samples Henry James, he will find "remarked", "answered", "interposed", "almost groaned", "wonderingly asked", "said simply", "sagely risked" and many more colourful carriers (these from a page or two of Roderick Hudson). Should they all be ironed out into "said"?

So what do you say, gang? Let's give the rules a rest for the rest of 2012? Because I have, you know, shit to do. I can't be here schooling you every time out. Peace out.

I've never cared much for David Gates's criticism. His intelligence is obvious but his reviews tend to be hobbled by smugness or self-regard - how I have longed to reach out and pop the "I" key from his keyboard - and his attempts at humor have always felt strained to this reader.

However, I thought his review on Sunday of Elliot Perlman's novel The Street Sweeper, despite its cruelty, was exceedingly instructive, and would serve my Novel IV students as a handy precis of what to avoid in their fiction. Gates's lessons, highlighted in two particular paragraphs, should probably hang above the desk of any beginning novelist (a category of which I still consider myself a member).

Novel IV is an advanced class, so it's primarly workshopping. The weekly lessons of Novel I-III are dispensed with in favor of sustained, detailed examinations of weekly submissions. But I took time out at the beginning of class to walk through Gates's review. This was the first of the two essential paragraphs:

... no decent writer should have to repeat variants of the line “Tell everyone what happened here” 12 times in two pages of a scene at Auschwitz; it takes on the robotic affect of the People’s Microphone at an Occupy rally, and it loses force with each use. The Auschwitz scenes, based on the testimony of real-life survivors, will break the stoniest heart — how could they not? — but even here Perlman can’t let ill enough alone. Two women about to be hanged for resisting the Nazis are described as “wingless sparrows,” as if the genuine pathos needed to be amped up with a sentimental image. Near the beginning of the novel, Perlman can’t resist framing the nightmarish murder of Emmett Till, and of the four black girls killed in the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, as a literal bad dream, experienced by his untenured Columbia historian. The well-read Perlman may have had in mind Stephen Dedalus’s line in “Ulysses” about history’s being a nightmare from which he was trying to awake, but will any reader find this dream plausible rather than just thematically convenient?

In this advanced workshop, I have taken to advising my students to be as thorough and detailed as they possibly can; to banish the word "nitpick" from their vocabulary; and to understand that if they fail to bring a rigorous, thoughtful sensibility to these critiques, there is surely someone waiting out there who will feel no similar reluctance. And it's sad day for the author if that person happens to be a Times reviewer. This first paragraph contains any number of amateur traps I warn my students about, particularly the last one - to beware of moments that exist solely to serve authorial convenience. But it's the second paragraph that is a gold mine of "Don'ts":

But the writing of fiction has its own forms of morality. Its code takes a hard line against such silly devices as the historian’s inner conversations with the girlfriend he abjured: “ ‘Adam, . . . you’re trying to turn your fear of the future, your panic about parenthood and professional failure into something noble that you’ve done for me. I never bought it.’ ‘Diana, it’s possible at the one time both to be afraid and to act nobly for another person.’ ” It evenhandedly forbids kitschy generic ingénues — “With dark eyes for falling into and jet-black hair, she could be both serious and funny, often at the same time” — and ciphers like “a charming, delightful woman in her 80s.” It demands that the writer clean up toxic spills of syntax: “A single guest at weddings, couples would admire her appearance almost excessively and, in so doing, embarrass her, never for a moment dreaming she might know loneliness every bit as well, every bit as sharp, as they ever had.” It calls for the renunciation of verbal pomp: “He was overwhelmed by a wave of self-loathing, panic and a sense of loss that, in staccato bursts, flushed the air from his lungs till the moisture in his sleep-starved eyes formed a vitreous glaze that mercifully blurred his reflection in the mirror.” As the Book of John puts it, Jesus wept. All these passages suggest a writer who, whether through inattention or inability, hasn’t engaged effectively with his characters or his language, who won’t or can’t take the work of fiction seriously.

I do warn my students against taking too dogmatic an approach to reading and writing, and I do caution that all rules can be broken. That said, this paragraph is a brilliant and efficient summary of things to avoid, things I see all the time: expository dialogue, particularly awful when it's unpacking emotional states; cliches both of language and character; lazy undescriptive descriptions (paraprhasing All The President's Men, I call these non-description descriptions); tangled, inept sentence work and unhinged prose. It's a bravura paragraph that I will keep close as I continue on the second novel.

I pointed out that Gates is very careful to provide specific examples of all his objections, though we also acknowledged that nearly any sentence can be taken out of context and made to look foolish. That said, it's hard to imagine any context in which the sentences noted above would work. (I do think the review's one failing - aside from the current of mean-spiritedness that seems to animate it - is there isn't a single, sustained quotation from the novel to really allow a reader to hear Perlman's voice.)

But that's a quibble and, as I told my students, even the nastiness is instructive and, in its way, salutary - every writer must take the maximum possible care with his or her prose, because when you play in the NFL, the hard knocks are out there. They are no fun to receive, as I can tell you, but no less instructive for the pain.

December 16, 2011

I find myself immensely and unexpectedly saddened today at the passing of Christopher Hitchens. We sat up late last night watching video clips on C-Span and Youtube, and downed a surprisingly tearful Lagavullin (neat) in his honor. It seemed the thing to do.

In the light of day, I am trying to understand my intense emotional reaction to the news, reminiscent of what I felt when Tony Judt, another great thinker and writer I did not know, died too soon. And yet, like so many others, I felt as if I knew him. He was always essential reading, even when he infuriated me, as he did often. More than once, I let him have it in these pages, to what point I was never certain – a mouse roaring, surely.

He could be maddening; his writing, at times, hobbled by excess self-regard; a rigidity approaching the sort of fanaticism he decried; and a brilliant rhetoric that sometimes masked weak underpinnings. The last two traits were most prominently on display in his support of the Iraq War, which alienated many, including myself. I was disappointed, but not surprised – his stance seemed utterly consistent with his absolute loathing for the thought police, be they on the left or right.

And yet. These were the same traits that made me love him. Although I share his atheism, I felt his anti-God arguments lacked a certain nuance. Yet I deeply admired his refusal to seek the consolation of a deathbed conversion. I also loved his refusal to renounce his louche ways, his devotion to pleasures both high and low, despite their ultimate cost. And I was in awe of his brilliance, his learning, his instant (it seemed) recall, his stunning wit. I don’t, as a rule, talk much about non-fiction, but I was effusive in my praise for Hitch-22 when I recommended it on NPR’s On Point.

But of the many Hitches (how many of us claimed the right to call him that, the unearned familiarity?), the polemicist, the political commentator, the contrarian, I think my favorite was the literary critic. Of his all books, my favorite, the one I return to time and again, is Unacknowledged Legislation: writers in the public sphere. If you’ve never heard of it, do yourself favor and add it to your shelves. People will probably remember him for Vanity Fair, but I preferred the remarkable book criticism he wrote for The Atlantic. When the political baggage was left at the door, he was as incisive and insightful a book reviewer as we had. Here he is on Philip Larkin, earlier this year.

Finally, though, I think the reason for my sorrow, for my tears, is simply this: There was great comfort in the fact that his voice was always there. Reliably combative, occasionally wrongheaded, always bracing, issuing a challenge that it was up to us to take up. I don’t believe one life is necessarily more worthy than any other, but he was a man who clearly made the absolute most of his time here, squeezed out every bit of experience. He never disengaged. It seems grotesquely unfair that he is gone, that silence remains. That is, I think, worthy of tears.

November 13, 2011

The French gastronome Brillat-Savarin began “The Physiology of Taste” (1825) by declaring, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” You are also what you read — or, perhaps, what you own. In my college dorm, a volume of Sartre was casually spread-­eagled across the futon when I expected callers. We display spines that we’ll never crack; we hide the books that we thumb to death. Emily Post disapproved: her 1930 home decorating manual compared “filling your rooms with books you know you will never open” to “wearing a mask and a wig.”

To expose a bookshelf is to compose a self. The artist Buzz Spector’s 1994 installation “Unpacking My Library” consisted of all the books in his library, arranged “in order of the height of spine, from tallest to shortest, on a single shelf in a room large enough to hold them.” Shortly after the 2008 election, a bookstore in New York set out 50-odd books to which Barack Obama had alluded in memoirs, speeches and interviews. The resulting collection revealed more about the president-elect than did any number of other displays of books by and about him.

And in this way, I began to think, our libraries perhaps say nothing very particular about us at all. Each brick in the wall of a library is a borrowed brick: several thousand people, perhaps several hundred thousand, own books by F.E. Peters. If I were led into Edmund Wilson’s library in Talcotville, would I know that it was Edmund Wilson’s library, and not Alfred Kazin’s or F.W. Dupee’s? We tend to venerate libraries once we know whose they are, like admiring a famous philosopher’s eyes or a ballet dancer’s foot. Pushkin had about a thousand non-Russian books in his library, and the editor of “Pushkin on Literature” helpfully lists all those foreign books, from Balzac and Stendahl to Shakespeare and Voltaire. She confidently announces that “much can be learnt of a man from his choice of books,” and then unwittingly contradicts herself by adding that Pushkin, like many other Russians of his class, read mostly in French: “The ancient classics, the Bible, Dante, Machiavelli, Luther, Shakespeare, Leibnitz, Byron … all are predominantly in French.” This sounds like the library of an extremely well-read Russian gentleman, circa 1830 – the kind of reading that Pushkin gave to this standard-issue Russian romantic, Eugene Onegin. But what is especially Pushkinian about the library? What does it tell us about his mind?

October 26, 2011

Most Americans, if they think of Somalia at all, know it only from Black Hawk Down, the 2001 film adaptation of Mark Bowden's 1999 account of the bloody Battle of Mogadishu. Tragic though those events were, they represent a mere sliver of the decades of internal strife that have left Somalia one of the poorest and most violent countries in the world. Moving from Communist rule to dictatorship to civil war, there has been no functioning central government for twenty years. Warlords and clan factions have given way to militant Islam, and pirates terrorize the coastal waters. "That unfortunate country, cursed with those dreadful clanspeople, forever killing one another and everyone around them," is the bleak précis offered by one of Nuruddin Farah's characters. It's to this unpromisingly harrowing milieu that Farah has tirelessly devoted himself for eleven novels that paint a more nuanced picture of the country's woes than one is likely to find on CNN.

Some years back, I wrote a brief reminiscence of my friend and writing teacher Steven Corbin. I've revised and expanded that essay as part of the Los Angeles Review of Books' Writers on Teacher series, and it's now online. An excerpt:

He looked at me from across the table, realizing that I hadn’t yet known (he thought he’d told me already); and he said, “I’ve shocked you.” I remember mumbling something non-committal but before I could absorb the news, Steven began talking with his familiar enthusiasm about how he was confident of his chances of beating it, that he was healthy, his t-cell count was good, that he was going to beat it. I nodded and was supportive but later that day in my journal, I wrote one sentence: “Steven is going to die.”

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

This slim volume by the president and founder of the Nexus Institute, a European-based humanist think-tank, stands as the most stirring redoubt against the ascendant forces of know-nothingness that we've come across in a long time. A full-throated, unapologetic defense of the virtues of Western Civ – in which "elite" is not and never should be a dirty word – this inspiring exploration of high art and high ideals is divided into three sections: The first looks at the life of Riemen's great hero Thomas Mann as a model for the examined life. The second imagines a series of conversations from turning points in European intellectual history, populated with the likes of Socrates, Nietzsche and others. The final section, "Be Brave," is nothing less than an exhortation to dig deep, especially in times of risk. The notion of nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever before, and there are worse ways to read the accessible Nobility of Spirit than as a crash refresher in the Great Thinkers, free of academic jargon and cant. As a meditation on what is at stake when the pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside by the pursuit of fleeting material gain, however, Nobility of Spirit might well be the most prescient book we've yet read on what's at stake in the current election cycle and in the developing global situation. Agree or disagree with Riemen's profound, ambitious and high-minded plea, you will be thinking about his words for a long time. It's been ages since a work of non-fiction moved us this way. Read it. Discuss it. Argue about it.

With rave reviews from James Wood, Michiko Kakutani and Dwight Garner, it might not seem like we need to tell you to drop everything and go read Netherland, but we are telling you, and here's why: The way book coverage works these days, everyone talks about the same book for about two or three weeks, and then they move on and the book is more or less forgotten. Whereas a berth here in the Recommended sidebar keeps noteworthy titles in view for a good, long time, which is the sort of sustained attention this marvelous novel deserves. A Gatsby-like meditation on exclusion and otherness, it's an unforgettable New York story in which the post 9/11 lives of Hans, a Dutch banker estranged from his English wife, and Chuck Ramkissoon, a mysterious cricket entrepreneur, intertwine. The New York City of the immigrant margins is unforgettably invoked in gorgeous, precise prose, and the novel's luminous conclusion is a radiant beacon illuminating one of our essential questions, the question of belonging. Our strongest possible recommendation.

"History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages which separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent. Read the entire review here

Now, on the one hand, you scarcely need us to alert you to the existence of a new J.M. Coetzee novel, or even to have us tell you it's worth reading. But we can tell you - we insist on telling you that Diary of a Bad Year is a triumph, easily Coetzee's most affecting and fully wrought work since Disgrace. Formally inventive, the book intertwines two narratives with the author's own Strong Opinions, a series of seemingly discrete philosophical and political essays. The cumulative effect of this strange trio is deeply moving and thought provoking. It's increasingly rare in this thoroughly post-post-modern age to raise the kind of questions in fiction Coetzee handles so masterfully - right down to what is it, exactly, that we expect (or need) from our novels. It's telling that, for all of his serious pronouncements on subjects ranging from censorship to pedophilia to the use of torture, it's finally a few pages from The Brothers Karamazov that brings him to tears. Moving, wise and - how's this for a surprise - funny and lightly self-mocking, Diary of a Bad Year might well be the book of the year and Coetzee is surely our essential novelist. We haven't stopped thinking about it since we set it down.

David Leavitt's magnificent new novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, mathematical autodidact and prodigy who had been working as a clerk in Madras, and who would turn out to be one of the great mathematical minds of the century. Ramanujan reluctantly joined Hardy in England - a move that would ultimately prove to his detriment - and the men set to work on proving the Riemann Hypothesis, one of mathematics' great unsolved problems. The Indian Clerk, an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, encompasses a World War, and boasts a cast of characters that includes Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lytton Strachey. Leavitt renders the complex mathematics in a manner that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, and writes with crystalline elegance. The metaphor of the prime number – divisible only by one and itself – is beautifully apt for this tale of these two isolated geniuses. Leavitt's control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times – and yet despite its scope, he keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. The Indian Clerk might be set in the past but it doesn't resemble most so-called "historical fiction." Rather, it's an ageless meditation on the quests for knowledge and for the self – and how frequently the two are intertwined – that is, finally, as timeless as the music of the primes. (View our full week of coverage here.)

Joshua Ferris' warm and funny debut novel is an antidote to the sneering likes of The Office and Max Barry's Company. Treating his characters with both affection and respect, Ferris takes us into a Chicago ad agency at the onset of the dot-bomb. Careers are in jeopardy, nerves are frayed and petty turf wars are fought. But there are bigger stakes in the balance, and Ferris' weirdly indeterminate point of view that's mostly first person plural, underscores the shared humanity of everyone who has ever had to sit behind a desk. It's a luminous, affecting debut and you can read the first chapter right here.

Coming to these shores at last, John Banville's thriller, written under the CR White Green Ricky Sneakers Verdant amp; Dee X Basket Puma nom de plumeBenjamin Black, has drawn rave reviews across the pond since it first appeared last October. Those who feared Banville might turn in an overly literary effort needn't worry. Influenced by Simenon's romans durs (hard stories), Banville unspools a dark mystery set in 1950s Dublin concerning itself with, among other things, the church's trade in orphans. At the heart of the book is the coroner Quirke, a Banvillean creation on par with Alex Cleave and Freddie Montgomery. Dublin is rendered with a damp, creaky specificity – you can almost taste the whisky.

Scanning our Recommended selections, one might conclude we're addicted to interviews, and one would be correct. If author interviews are like crack to us, then the Paris Review author interviews must surely be the gold standard of crack (a comparison Plimpton might not have embraced). The newly issued The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I (Picador) rolls out the heavy hitters. Who can possibly turn away from the likes of Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Dorothy Parker, Robert Gottlieb and others? The interviews are formal and thoughtful but never dry and can replace any dozen "how-to" books on writing. What can be more comforting than hearing Bellow, answering a question on preparations and conception, admit "Well, I don't know exactly how it's done.” The best part of this collection? The "Volume I" in the title, with its promise of more volumes to come.

The best short story collection we've read since ... well, certainly since we've started this blog. And we might even say "ever" if Dubliners didn't cast such a long shadow. The short story is not our preferred form but D'Ambrosio's eight brilliant stories are almost enough to convert us. Defy the conventional wisdom that short story collections don't sell and treat yourself to this marvel. (We're especially partial, naturally, to "Screenwriter".)

What would you do if the woman who’d left you high and dry ten years ago called out of the blue to invite you to a party without any further explanation? If you’re French, you’d probably spend a lot of time pondering the Deeper Significance Of It All, which is exactly what Grégoire Bouillier does for the 120 hilarious pages of The Mystery Guest. This slim, witty memoir follows Bouillier through the party from hell, and is a case study in Gallic self-abasement. Before it’s all done, you’ll set fire to any turtleneck hanging in your closet and think twice before buying an expensive Bordeaux as a gift. But fear not – just when it seems that all is, indeed, random and pointless and there is no Deeper Significance, salvation arrives in the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf, and the tale ends on a note of unforced optimism. Parfait.

When George Ticknor's Life of William Hickling Prescott was published in 1864, it received rapturous notices, and reviewers were quick to point out that the long-standing friendship between Prescott and Ticknor made the latter an ideal Boswell. Sheila Heti has pulled this obscure leaf from the literary archives and fashioned a mordantly funny anti-history; a pungent and hilarious study of bitterness and promise unfulfilled. As a fretful Ticknor navigates his way through the rain-soaked streets of Boston to Prescott's house ("But I am not a late man. I hate to be late."), he recalls his decidedly one-sided lifelong friendship with his great subject. Unlike the real-life Ticknor, this one is an embittered also-ran, full of plans and intentions never realized, always alive to the fashionable whispers behind his back. Heti seamlessly inhabits Ticknor's fussy 19th-century diction with a feat of virtuoso ventriloquism that puts one in mind of The Remains of the Day. Heti's Ticknor would be insufferable if he weren't so funny, and in the end, the black humor brings a leavening poignancy to this brief tale. But don't let the size fool you — this 109-page first novel is small but scarcely slight; it is as dense and textured as a truffle.

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you and yes, we are recommending a Believer product. Twenty-three interviews (a third presented for the first time) pairing the likes of Zadie Smith with Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem with Paul Auster, Edward P. Jones and ZZ Packer, and Adam Thirwell with Tom Stoppard make this collection a must-read. Lifted out of the context of some of the magazine's worst twee excesses, the interviews stand admirably on their own as largely thoughtful dialogues on craft. A handful of interviewers seem more interested in themselves than in their subjects but in the main this collection will prove irresistible to writers of any stripe - struggling or established - and to readers seeking a window into the creative process.

John Banville's latest novel returns him to the Booker Prize shortlist for the first time since 1989's The Book of Evidence. In The Sea, we find Banville in transition, moving from the icy, restrained narrators of The Untouchable, Eclipse and Shroud toward warmer climes. Max Morden has returned to the vacation spot of his youth as he grieves the death of his wife. Remembering his first, fatal love, Morden works to reconcile himself to his loss. Banville's trademark linguistic virtuosity is everpresent but some of the chilly control is relinquished and Max mourns and rages in ways that mark a new direction for Banville - and there's at least one great twist which you'll never see coming. Given the politicized nature of the British literary scene, Banville's shot at the prize might be hobbled by his controversial McEwan review but we're rooting for our longtime favorite to go all the way at last. UPDATE: Our man won!

We've been fans of Booker Prize winner John Berger for ages, and we're delighted to have received an early copy of his latest work, Here is Where We Meet. In this lovely, elliptical, melancholy "fictional memoir," Berger traverses European cities from Libson to Geneva to Islington, conversing with shades from his past – He encounters his dead mother on a Lisbon tram, a beloved mentor in a Krakow market. Along the way, we're treated to marvelous and occasionally heart-rending glimpses of an extraordinary life, a lyrical elegy to the 20th century from a man who - in his eighth decade - remains committed to his political beliefs and almost childlike in his openness to people, places and experiences. There's no conventional narrative here, and those seeking plot are advised to look elsewhere. But Here is Where We Meet offers a wise, moving and poetic look at the life of an artist traversing the European century from a novelist whose talent remains undimmed in his twilight years.

In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.

SECOND LOOK

Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.

Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."